Oregon’s public forests get thrown over the funding cliff: Guest opinion

View full sizeU.S. Bureau of Land Management forester Craig Brown checks the slope of a planned road on a logging project on federal forest land outside Ruch, Ore.Jeff Barnard/The Associated Press/2011

By Sean Stevens

While Congress and the White House continue to wrangle over our nation's fiscal health, Oregonians face our own government funding dilemma: How do we raise revenues for the cash-strapped O&C counties, which are home to 2.6 million acres of federal forestland known as the O&C lands?

Low property tax rates and the expiration of federal safety-net payments have Lane, Curry, Coos, Josephine and other western Oregon counties staring down the prospect of reduced government services and even insolvency. Sadly, the county funding debate has been based in about as much common sense as the conversation about our federal deficit and the manufactured crisis of the so-called fiscal cliff.

As The Oregonian recently reported ("Timber panel can't cut deal," Feb. 7), we've been looking for revenue in all the wrong places, falsely assuming we can log our way out of this funding hole. In essence, we've been trying to throw our forests over the county funding cliff.

To his credit, Gov. John Kitzhaber admitted this month in his O&C report that we can't raise enough revenue through logging western Oregon's public forests without eliminating our most basic environmental laws. Doing away with protections for clean water and endangered wildlife isn't a long-term solution for prosperity. We shouldn't trade a dollar today for clear-cut hillsides and dirty streams tomorrow.

The governor also echoed the sentiments of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, stating that state and county governments must share responsibility for filling the funding gap. Reinstituting a state logging severance tax that Oregon eliminated in the 1990s and modernizing property tax rates in counties that currently have some of the lowest taxes in the state are two viable options.

Even with these more balanced solutions on the table, the logging industry and the elected officials it supports will cry out for ever-increasing logging on public lands. They'll clamor for more clear-cuts. They'll complain that restoration thinning won't supply mills with big enough trees. They will advocate for reckless logging levels that would damage Oregon's tourism and recreation economy and put our clean drinking water and wild salmon at risk.

Those who have followed the forest wars over the years know that 2013 is but the most recent act in a drama that has been going on for over a century -- and the land shows the battle scars.

Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, was an early proponent of conserving forests to avoid short-term exploitation. He also believed that forest should be protected to be used for the benefit of people. In other words, Pinchot was no tree hugger.

Still, later in his life when he returned to see the great forests of the Northwest, he was shocked by the devastation. In his diary he wrote: "The Forest Service should absolutely declare against clear-cutting in Washington and Oregon as a defensive measure."

Pinchot made that observation in 1937, long before the clear-cut logging epidemic that swept across Oregon in the 1970s and '80s.

What Pinchot was advocating back then -- responsible, science-based management of our public lands -- is being successfully practiced today on forests such as the Siuslaw, in Oregon's Coast Range. There, managers focus on thinning in areas previously damaged by logging and on improving habitat for wildlife and salmon. They consistently meet their timber goals but do so without conflict or controversy.

Unfortunately, Kitzhaber's report argues that these types of conservation thinning projects are unacceptable, as they provide only a 25-year supply of timber and they won't produce the big, old trees that some logging companies still lust after. In my mind, that is a good thing.

A 25-year supply of timber that improves the health of Oregon's environment, creates sustainable jobs, avoids conflict and allows future generations to make their own decisions about how our public lands should be managed is exactly the kind of solution Oregon needs.